


something beyond blood

by ecotone



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Light Problems(tm), just before curse of osiris
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 17:59:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17329769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecotone/pseuds/ecotone
Summary: The Light comes back, but it doesn't come back quite the same.





	something beyond blood

The seventh time Luana falls down the Bazaar’s stairs, she leaves the Tower. 

She saves herself some embarrassment— the hallway is empty this late at night, and her Blink catches her mid-air and sends her safely through local space and onto the tile floor. She still pushes the heels of her hands against her eyes, frustrated, the pressure hard enough to send dots spiraling down her vision when she finally lets go. Her Ghost doesn’t transmat in, but he sends a wave of worry-concern-questioning at her. She ignores it. 

It’s been almost three months. Three months since Towerfall and the War and standing on the hull of a ship with the Traveler looming, a great prisoner or judge or arbiter. Her Light’s been back for almost as long, but everything still feels _off_ , somehow. Like one great simulation with just enough changed to send everything off-kilter. She feels lost in her own home, confused and unwelcome and ghostly. 

(Xīng had listened too intently the first time Luana had spoken of it, the strange vertigo that came when she jumped, how heavy and useless an arc staff felt in her hands. It was the type of quiet absorption that comes with Warlocks, the kind that arises when they’re looking for an answer instead of listening. The kind that, when there wasn't one, led to mad chases down Hive-tunnels and the overrun halls of Ishtar Academy, looking for proof of something beyond proving. 

“It’s likely because of the Shard,” Xīng had said eventually, all quiet fear underneath composure— she’d still been Lightless, then, skin oddly warm without the Void to cool it. She’d flung her hands out into some elaborate gesture to hide their shaking. Her veins stood out against the skin between sleeve and glove, blue-purple, like there was still some Void Light in her. “It’s impossible to tell, without any information, without any tests, but—” 

And Luana had left once the possibilities became too overwhelming, because it didn’t matter what had happened if she was clumsy and useless and bitter. Light and absence and returning, like—

The arc popping in her joints hurt, and she drew the staff from the ether just to ease the tension straining in her arms. Swing, swing, jump, push, all of it and still sometimes she’d miss a Dreg by a yard and a half. She missed her knives even though they were probably just a melted mess underneath a ton of rubble.) 

Luana goes down through the Bazaar and through the small blue-lit door and down seventeen flights of stairs. She does not look up as she goes, counting and watching her feet drop down two at a time. When she arrives at the bottom she goes though a twin door still soot-stained and passes the security checkpoint, does not stop to check out because the night-shift guards know her and her strange moods. 

The trees are tall and dark, like the ones on the edges of the Cosmodrome walls. 

(“Maybe it’s homesickness,” Xīng said, testing Io’s strange warmth with an outstretched hand. “You’re trying to use a staff like a knife. Your internal Light doesn’t match with that of the Shard.” Her robes were short-tailed and dirty, nothing like the long ornate coats she’d worn in the days before her vanishing, when Atheon and Crota and Skolas were dead by their hands and the world was open and beautiful. 

Lost and then found, dirty and bloody and Lightless. Luana refused the comparison her brain wanted her to make. She was a Hunter and Hunters did not traffic in metaphor.) 

She walks for three miles until she finds the outcropping she spends most of her nights on, now— she had found it soon after the Garden had died, looking for respite from the revelry and questioning glances. The tall grass is mostly brown, this late in the year, and the cold air bites at her cheeks even with her cloak drawn close to her face. 

Three years, inching ever-closer to four, and she still feels like a child again. It’s the same as when she was first wandering the Divide, aiming a Golden Gun with shaky hands before she’d found peace within the Arc. That storm had carried her so far, elegant lethality cutting through Fallen and Hive and the aging forces of the Cabal. But then Oryx came, and she’d lost her foothold, and the Void had been all she’d had to cling to. The last transmissions of a dying man, and an arrow through Oryx’s chest, and cold for two years afterward. 

(And Xīng hadn’t even told her before she’d gone, had she? It’d been cold Warlock logic, or maybe self-deception: it didn’t really matter, that she was leaving. What was one coward when there were five other God-killers, all still ready to fight?

But then Luana hadn’t been ready, had she? Hadn’t she killed Oryx in days on adrenaline alone, then taken his throne, and then lost her blades for months after, unable to call anything but nothing?) 

At least the Void had made it through the years unchanged, unaffected by dead gods and a captured-turned-awoken Traveler. Some things— castaways, trapped in shards, hidden away in wilderness— had escaped unaffected.

None of them can really say the same, she knows. Every Guardian had been mortal for weeks, months, and no amount of running had protected them from that. She will not find her old self trapped in amber, waiting to be freed. 

She needs to stop looking. 

The rock is cold under her hands as she sits, half-hidden in the long grass. The first time she had come here the night had been young, still warm, and its heat had let her bask and take in the slowly-arriving stars. She’d gone to sleep, mostly by accident; when she’d woken in the morning it had felt like a new earth, like everything that had happened was nothing more than a Vex simulation she’d managed to escape. The Traveler had looked the same as it always had, oblivious to the long chain of Earth-Moon-Venus-Mars that had led her into the Garden. Asleep, even after everything they had done. 

She watches it now. Its shell had exploded out from it during its awakening, and now it looks a little like the egg Sherbet-5 had dropped on her kitchen floor the first time he’d tried to cook. Awake, now, but still oblivious to the Shard and her and her Light, all wrapped up into one. 

Maybe not. She closes her eyes, draws the end of her cloak up over her. She will wake up in the morning, and maybe she will find herself in a new world again, and maybe it will be the day her staff is not so heavy in her hands.

**Author's Note:**

> happy 2019, everyone! have some old fic from 2017. 
> 
> (fun fact, if you're so inclined: sherbet-5 is the same baby hunter from my old towerfall fic! he looks like a creamsicle.) 
> 
> thanks for reading! <3


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